Stand on Rutan's shoulders? What, by building spacecraft out of epoxy? By using engines that they didn't make that have the amazing combination of both lousy ISP *And* high tank mass? And having it cost 10 times more than it should for the performance that they get out of it? What progress, exactly, are you referring to?

I agree on the second part, though - God willing, Bush will be written up for his legacy of job loss, environmental damage, turning the world against America, and unprovoked warmongerin

Need we point out the billions of dollars of illegal business Halliburton did with Iraq in the 1990's, under Cheney's watch (as CEO of Halliburton)?

Need we point out that EVERY SINGLE SHRED of evidence in the so-called "oil for food fraud scandal" was *lost* when "evul hackerz broke into my computer and erased the hard drive and all the backups, HONEST!" - All the evidence comes from Ahmed Chalabi's INC. The same Ahmed Chalabi who's wanted in Jordan for embezzling $300 Million from Petra Bank. The same Ahmed Chalabi who passed on highly sensitive (read: Classified) US SIGINT information to Iranian Intelligence. The same Ahmed Chalabi that ran a ring to re-submit old Saddam Dinars in exchange for new CPA Dinars, AT US TAXPAYER EXPENSE! The same Ahmed Chalabi whose Nephew had an Iraqi finance minister assassinated. The same Ahmed Chalabi who took tens of millions of US TAXPAYER dollars every month throughout the Bush Administration, in exchange for information about Saddams WMD programs - ALL of which ultimately proved FALSE. The same Ahmed Chalabi who has ties to Ghorbanifar (yes, THAT Ghorbanifar, the arms dealer from the Iran-Contra days).

The SAME Ahmed Chalabi who sat behind Laura Bush at the State of the Union address in 2002.

George Bush and his Administration has made a very close ally of this man. They trusted a traitor. They are NOT on our side, and have done more harm than good to US security. Both with their policies enacted during the Reagan and Bush I adminsitrations, and the crap they're pulling in the Bush Administration.

And you people put these white-collar criminals back in office.

The "Only those who were opposed to the US were involved in scandalous activities" is a laugh and a half. Keep watching Fox and keep taking those Blue Pills Neo.

This man is an inspiration to everybody. He is innovative, intelligent, and follows through with his dreams and goals. So tell me why, WHY Dub Bush gets Time's Person of the Year and Rutan does not.

Relax and let history be the judge. Time's Man/Person of the Year has included every US predident going back at least to JFK. They had to do W at some point. How big of an honor can it be, anyway? Hitler was it 1938. See a list here [about.com]).

Exactly. It has very little to do with merit. After all, just what did Bush achieve or do in 2000 that was so exemplorary and worthy of merit to win the award in that year?

Winning an election in which more people voted for the other guy and in which dirty tricks, family connections and ultimately heavily contested court cases were the deciding factors hardly counts as a great and noble achievement.

Time's Person (nee Man) of the Year originally was not meant to be a "This person did the greatest things this year" award. Rather, it was about who most influenced current events that year...hence why both Hitler and Stalin recieved it.

Many argue that the Person of the Year for 2001 should have been Osama bin Laden, rather than Rudolph Giuliani. No one is going to say that bin Laden is a nice guy...but his actions influenced 2001 more than any single person.

Apparently Time had some pretty big arguments in-house when it came to picking the Person of the 20th Century. Again, if you're choosing Most Influential Person, it probably would have been Hitler, but in these PC days it's not something that most would find accceptable.

According to your own link, they already did W in 2000. He has now joined a very exclusive list of people to make TMotY twice.

Oh, well I didn't know anyone was actually going to RTFL!;-)

I look at it this way: it's a comment on magazine sales, not historical signficance or suitability as a role model. Everyone in the US knows who W is. As much as we on/. would like it to be so, I suspect that most Americans do not know who Rutan is. Add to that our being in Iraq and W being an extremely devisive fi

Because Bush is more controversial, and his face on the cover will sell more magazineS than somebody who has taken part in something so enormous its consequences can barely be imagined.

With all due respect, I think Bush has had a far greater impact on the world that Rutan will. Bush invaded Afghanistan, instituted massive tax cuts, racked up huge government deficits, added prescription drug benefits to Medicare, invaded Iraq, and made huge changes in US policy towards Israel/Palestine and North Korea. By

Because you don't need wings starting around Mach 2-3. After that point, they become dead weight and add drag.

A lot of folks think that the mass penalty of carying extra fuel for landing is less than the mass penalty of carying wings (a penalty which includes extra fuel and engine mass to compensate for the increased drag).

If you are doing SSTO, you can have much less sophisticated heat shielding because the requirements of heat shielding decrease as you get less dense. At reentry, a SSTO is not very dense at all, so it's easier. Also, there's some arguments about reentering tail-first and using the engines to reduce the heat loading, which hasn't yet been tested.

Furthermore, range safety is simpler with VTOL. You have to assume that, at any point, your spacecraft could explode, raining parts down on populated land. Less gliding means less area to wory about. Airliners don't need to wory about such things, but airliners also have a good track record of not blowing up. Spacecraft don't have that record yet.

Ejection seats and escape capsules aren't very heavy, if they are included in the design early (They are now saying that, given that both the Challenger and Columbia's crew cabin survived the explosion intact, that they really could have made it removable for a minimum weight penalty. However, it's too late to do that now.)

The biggest problem is that NASA spent all of their time between the 1980s and today designing a bunch of different concepts for spacecraft, none of which have actually flown enough to be able to contribute factual data about all of this except for a few low-altitude hops made by the DC-X that made the VTOL model seem rather reasonable.

I'm not so sure that a rocket plume would be your best source... you want laminar flow, not turbulent flow. Turbulent flow transfers a lot more heat to the craft at hypersonic velocities. Perhaps simple jets of liquified gas, injected at regular intervals along the control surface, would be better.

An ever bigger problem with the shuttle tiles is that they are so fragile that the supposedly reusable heat shield (indeed the whole vehicle) needs to be effectivly rebuilt after every flight.Thus the whole thing ends up costing far more than a vehicle intended to be replaced after every flight.Airlines would go bankrupt if Boeing and Airbus turned out planes which required a "heavy maintanance visit" every flight. The only way in which spac

And the government only understands flying it's own to space. NASA will never deliver on affordable spaceflight for the rest of us. If you take a moment to follow Rutan's interview his motivation is clear - and it is not profit - although he understand running a business fine without spending taxpayer money.

His drive is to fulfill a life-long goal of traveling to space. I bet many slashdotters share that desire.

See, I think you are placing too much faith in the government. Now, I'm a political moderate, not a liberatarian who's going to tell you that all government besides the bedrock requirements is bad.

The problem is, almost inevitably, private industry can do "things" more efficently than the government. This is the same reason why a monopoly is bad -- because there's no competition, people stop improving stuff.

Thus, one of the goals of a good government is to provide structure, where necessary, to grow ind

Airliners are private.Health care seems private from this end - most people I know takes at least one type of medicine he buys himself (homeopathic or prescribed non-free medicine).We have medical plans, payed by docking our salary. If I need a major surgery, I pay some of it and my financed-out-of-my-salary insurance pays the rest. Nothing here is government, nor profit-free.Same for accidents insurance, in my history. I was the cause of the accident so I had to pay, despite insurance. No government protec

The bad news is that SpaceShipOne will be retired straight to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum...

This has to be the stupidest comment I have seen in a/. article posting in a long time. Does this person have any regard at all for the enormous historical value this space ship has?

Imagine it was *not* retired, then went down in flames in a subsequent mission. A very important part of humanity's history would be lost, forever.

Try to think beyond the next few years for once in your life. You can send up payloads in SpaceShipTwo, or SpaceShipThree, or SpaceShipNineteen. But there is only one SpaceShipOne. And I for one would like it to still be around in 80 years, so I can go to the museum with my great-grandchildren and say "Look what some people of my generation accomplished".

Historical value isn't necessarily the most important consideration. I think it would also have enourmous value as a working spaceship. Spaceship two, etc. are not yet built. Why not try out One's legs a bit more, work out some more kinks to make Two and Three and the rest that much better that much quicker?

Because the owner and the designer agree that that's not what they want to do.

You aren't explaining why they decided not to fly it more. I think it is surprising that they don't test this craft more to make sure all the bugs they had to fix really are worked out rather than just patches over the symptoms without fixing the actual problem.

Because its a death-trap in the long run?It was designed to reach the x-price. Ist just reached the height, it did the 2 runs. Plus it had a real nasty spin in one that didnt remotely look funny or planned.Somewhere else, back after the second flight there was talk about needed improvements to counter such behaviour, which would be implemented in a successor.Think about it: that thing may have 95%, or lets say 99% success rate. That would be a good value for a cutting ende test-design. 2 tries without probl

Agreed. As long as they can afford it, it seems to make sense to retire SS1 and use the expertise they gained to build SS2.

The article was hardly the stupidest thing I've seen, but I agree that it's hardly bad news to retire it. It has done what it was built to do. The investment was in the design, not the construction. Construct a new one, a better one, and let the prototype become an artifact.

Woah now! I'm the original submitter. I really should've put some quotes around "bad news" to show that I was trying to be amusingly flippant. I didn't think anyone would actually think I seriously thought that putting SpaceShipOne in a museum for future generations to admire was some sort of tragedy.

Granted, it would have been exciting to see the craft launch again, but they've presumably learned all they need to learn from SpaceShipOne. Their knowledge will go into SpaceShipTwo, which will be better and

Its not about historical value, the damn thing is a death trap. The documentary the Discovery channel showed exactly how dangerous that thing is and how lucky Rutan got. Its not worth attempting to fly again. They won the prize and so far no one has died. Mission accomplished.

Its really a proof of concept rocket. "Can we build a cheap-ish rocket out of composites and get into space?" Yes, they did. And it was risky. So off to the museum it goes while they build a much safer and profitable flyer.

Second System Syndrome can usually be chalked up to poor project management. Without proper leadership any project can spiral out of control and never reach a conclusion. Poor focus, scope creep, bad testing, a failure to meet the customer's requirements.

Burt Rutan knows how to get what he wants from his people. He's a good leader with a good team. And the part that might make the biggest difference between Scaled and PARC - it's Burt's show. He's always the deciding vote. I'm sure he's kicked a lot of dea

I think it's a little stupid to retire it to the museum. Sure, it's a valuable piece of history, but there are plenty of things that they could have done with it that would have improved awareness and possibly increased sponsorship efforts.

Here are a few random thoughts on what I would have considered doing, had I been in charge:

A tour of airshows, possibly even marking the "start" or "close" of the airshow by having SpaceShipOne dropped at a fairly low altitude & speed, to glide in. There's always some risk with flight in general, so there's some chance of an accident, but getting the "unwashed masses" up close to SpaceShipOne will reinforce the idea that space travel could become within the reach of anyone. A static display would be safer, but wouldn't require the real thing either. It also wouldn't have the same impact.

SpaceShipOne can carry three people. A top-notch celebrity, or top-ranking politician would likely pay very big money to be taken on a simple flight (go up a bit, no rockets, just glide down). Photo ops tend to revolve around celebs getting out of aircraft, so the lack of any really dangerous stuff would be irrelevent to them.

There are usually "special" amateur rocket events in many countries. Can you imagine what impact it would have on the sport, if SpaceShipOne was trucked in? Not launched, but just there for the gawp value?

SpaceShipOne can carry three people. A top-notch celebrity, or top-ranking politician would likely pay very big money to be taken on a simple flight (go up a bit, no rockets, just glide down). Photo ops tend to revolve around celebs getting out of aircraft, so the lack of any really dangerous stuff would be irrelevent to them.

One problem is SS1 is still an experimental aircraft. Under FAA regulations, you can't use it in a for-hire operation. That means you can't just start selling tickets for SS1 rides.

Scaled would have to make SS1 into a certificated airframe first, which is a horrendously expensive and lengthy process, and doesn't make sense with SS1 being a one of a kind technology prototype. My guess is with SS2 they're going to work on certification from the beginning, and given that it'll carry 9 people and they'll build more than one of them, the certification costs can be spread out more and be recovered easier.

I'm not telling him what to do with it. I'm saying what I'd do, which is entirely different. There's nothing that says Rutan and myself can't both be wrong, or even can't both be right. Maybe the museum is a superb idea, but maybe my thoughts would be equally good.

The dumb thing is to assume he HAS to be right and that everyone else HAS to be wrong by the mere fact of disagreeing with him.

Last I heard, there was more than one kind of airplane in the sky. More than one kind of airframe, too. Aircraft are

I was actually talking about this a few dats agi with a co-worker. I'm hoping that by the time you can purchase tickets for this, I'll have the funds to do so. I plan on being the first man to consume hallucinogens in suborbit. Take a small syrette with some LSD along, hit it while preparing to depart, and enjoy the trip.

The cost is all in the intellectual work to create the design and prove it works. The airframe itself is on the order of $1 to 3 million for materials and labor.

IT IS INTERESTING that a brilliant engineer like Rutan would be moving to a completely new 9 passenger SpaceShip2 instead of putting airframe #1 of SS1 into the Smithsonian and selling hops on her sister ships.Though he does seem to reveal there was an internal discussion...

Flying the design again has nothing to do with any of the previous post

If this Subcommittee hears no other message through the barrage of studies, projections and policy recommendations, it must hear this message. A reformed space policy focused on opening the space frontier through commercial incentives will make all the difference to our future as a world, a nation and as individuals.

its pretty easy to make a press release - that costs no money. virgin is an interesting company having as many bad ideas as good. branson seems to jump on bandwagons and push the 'maximum publicity' button at any oppertunity.

virgin rail was launched in a blaze of media coverage with branman waving from trains etc. promising the earth. years later fares are much higher and the service seems to be much worse from what i read.

a few years ago i believe he had to sell 49% of virgin atlantic, it was the only thing making any money. needed the cash to pay off debts.

so whatever you do please just dont quote this ludicrous plan (and a ludicrous name- galactic? we havent even got there yet!) and give him more bloody free publicity. only mention it when it becomes a reality.

just to clarify, when i say 'ludicrous' i mean not that the idea of selling space flight is bad, it is the level of involvment that virgin would actually have.

chances are it would just be a licensing deal like virgin cola or virgin mobile. i dont believe they have the money to fund something that big. he would be sent into space grinning like a looney in a chunky jumper (as usual) and the ships would be read. that's really about it.

i don't know what you think of him in the states but really anybody with a

Take such Saiuz from Russians. No doubt it starts vertically. All of them do. Then the capsule lands on parachutes, mostly vertically too. Only shuttles don't land vertically. So essentially most of our spaceships are VTOL.

Answer: Well, I think I will spend a large percentage if not all of my main efforts for the rest of my career on manned-space travel. I think we can, if we do it right, be within 20 to 25 years of being able to visit hotels in orbit and many thousands of people being able to afford to do that. I would like to see affordable travel to the moon before I die, so I am starting relatively soon on developments for orbital-space tourism.

"The department title for this article should be from the 'Make-NASA-look-dumb' department."

I fail to see how any of this makes NASA look even remotely "dumb." Actually, I think you're bringing up a very valid point. This is why space exploration hasn't taken off (no pun intended) to the full scale people would have expected it to by now. There are too many people, agencies, organizations, and even governments working against each other instead of with each other.

Question: Considering your motivation to innovate and design futuristic air/spacecraft, are you attracted to the Centennial Prizes offered by NASA to develop new craft designs?

Answer: Oh no, I don't believe NASA can properly put out a (developmental) prize like the Orteg Prize or the Kramer Prize, or either the X Prize. NASA has a real habit of trying to help sub-contractors and contractors by monitoring risks that NASA wouldn't take themselves. What NASA needs to do is to put out a very

Gotta love that. The person who plans to send up people on his rocket wants there to be no monitoring of risks before launch. Lets not forget that this is the same guy who nearly killed his test pilot by launching in high wind conditions, because he didn't want to disappoint the crowd below. Pardon me if I'm awaiting the first space tourist bodies here.

He's going to have a heck of a time getting insurance. A batch of homemade cookies says that he tries to avoid having to get insurance for the passenger

Pretty much any article about their first flight to enter space mentions the major uncontrolled rolls that they had, which they weren't able to get back under control until reentry. Unplanned rolls under high thrust conditions are incredibly dangerous in any craft, let alone an experimental one. They were attributed to high wind shear.

I can't find the article any more, but people who were there said that the wind on the ground gusted up to 40 mph the day that they launched.

I thought I read that those rolls were cause by a control surface malfunction/deficiency that was later corrected. At that altitude, "normal" control surfaces really don't work and all the pilot could do was wait until he was back in atmosphere to right the ship.

I do know for a fact that the flight profile was also changed on subsequent flights to lessen the possibility of the craft entering an uncorrectable roll.

Wind shear is a fact of life at the altitude where SS1 is in the early supersonic boost phase. It was made worse by the fact that the jet stream was farther south than normal for that time of year, but the risk was known and accounted for as much as is reasonably possible for such an innovative project.

The real cause of the uncommanded roll was an issue with the wing dihedral, which is used to provide a natural corrective tendency for crosswinds. It's difficult to design a mach 3.5 spaceship that is also a 70 knot glider.

The test pilot, Mike Melvill, had ample time to abort the flight. He felt confident and in sufficient control to continue the first suborbital flight. Burt and Mike are very close friends and have been since the 1970s. Ground control suggested an abort, but Mike was comfortable with the roll rate. Yes, he's that good. He later commented that it was "kind of cool". Mike was clearly not too upset by the 20+ rolls as he corkscrewed into space, because a minute later he was playing with M&Ms in microgravity.

So don't go throwing around reckless comments about Burt almost getting a test pilot killed. It's a lie, plain and simple. The truth is, Burt Rutan has done almost 400 designs and for decades has consistently averaged flight testing a couple of truly unique aircraft, and now spacecraft, per year. None of his projects have ever resulted in an injury, much less a fatality. The few incidents have all been minor, such as the SS1 test flight where the left landing gear collapsed after a rough landing. Burt Rutan has the best safety record in the industry, while simultaneously doing the most cutting edge designs. He attributes a large part of that safety to an environment that wouldn't be possible in a large bureaucracy, whether in government or big business.

The SS1 roll problem was fixed by simply changing the flight profile and the two subsequent X-Prize flights had no trouble. The dihedral issue will be corrected in SS2, which is probably one reason that SS1 is being retired after accomplishing the X-Prize mission. That, and the fact that it is a very valuable historic spacecraft.

So for anyone keeping score, NASA has lost two shuttles with all crew (14 people total) out of a little over 100 missions, for a little less than a 2% fatality rate. SS1 has been into space three times with no injuries. Safety is a big part of the SS1 design, including the novel "carefree reentry".

There were some uninformed opinions and lame attempts at sick humor prior to the SS1 success. Why do some people need to see the dark side of everything? Why do some people need to comment about things when they are totally clueless?

You clearly don't understand what is happening. The X-Prize was created to change the entire process of space exploration and development. So far, it has been all about huge government projects, where the goal seems to be to spend as much money as possible while doing as little flying as possible. I'm not knocking the engineers or astronauts at NASA. In fact, I feel sorry for them, trapped in the bureaucracy that won't let them do what they want to do. Governments are not good at invention, innovation, cost reduction, or creative thinking. Entrepreneurs and free enterprise excel in these areas.

Here's the important part you're probably not getting. The recent initial foray into the privatization of space is NOT trying to carry on in the manner of NASA or any other big government or big business space program. They're starting over completely from scratch, using current technology and developing new technology to make space accessable to everyone. We are in the early crawling stages right now, but as any parent can tell you, kids grow up fast. Soon, we'll be walking, then running. There will be other goals such as altitude records, distance records in parabolic flight, etc. Soon, we'll have orbital flight. Although the SS1 can't withstand reentry at orbital velocities, a lot of the technology from SS1 is applicable to orbital flight. After that, there will be privately owned orbital resorts and microgravity manufacturing plants, and eventually private trips to the moon. Watch it happen in the next twenty years.

Private companies will make very rapid progress and will soon surpass NASA and other government sponsored space programs. The financial incentive exists, as does the technical drive to accomplish these goals. Private enterprise will recapitulate NASA's accomplishments, only much faster and for a lot less money.

Many people fail to see the analogy, but the X-Prize really was just like the Orteig [wikipedia.org] Prize that encouraged the first trans-Atlantic airplane crossing in 1927. We are about to enter the era of space development that is similar to what the 1930s was to the aviation industry in all important respects.

Except for the fact that tech developed for the Orteig prize was actually applicable to furthering aviation. SS1 is distinctly *backwards* in every respect. It's like people were driving around in cars, and you made a go-cart with a baking soda and vinegar engine, and people called it a step in the right direction.

Private companies *can* get to space, and I really look forward to it. But SS1 did nothing in this direction except inspire.

You make some good points. Profit is certainly a strong motive in the commercial development of space. In the simplest analysis, profit is more revenue than expenses. At first, the costs will be higher, although still orders of magnitude less than NASA. As technology improves and economies of scale apply, the costs will come down and access to space will be more affordable.

The lack of a profit motive is the reason NASA has developed space access as they have. They are in the business of spending mone

A little before SS1 did it's two X-prize flights, a few quiet news articles [space.com] announced that Scaled Composites was being contracted to supply the dropship for glide tests for the X37 program. Speculation is that the White Knight carrier plane is to be used for this, so although SS1 might not get flown again, White Knight probably will, and there will be some extra cash coming in from the project.